Alternative Bullshit.

Fool’s World Map: ‘Stultorum Infinitus est Nemerus’ G201:1/43. Source.

I was reading a post at Pharyngula about the “Intellectual Dark Web” idiots, and came to an abrupt halt over these sentences:

There is also an irritating but genuine grain of truth deep beneath the layers of whining. Campus leftists and their allies in the media are often no more open to alternative perspectives than the New Republic white male elite of two decades ago; they can behave badly too.

This was my comment in response:

I came to a screeching halt in front of this disgusting apologia. The rest isn’t worth my time. This is utter bullshit, there’s no “irritating, genuine grain of truth” there at all. “Alternative Views” is nuspeak for the same old evil bigotry and discrimination that people keep trying to resurrect. Sticking an “alt” in front of these old chestnuts doesn’t change a fucking thing. I can’t even say just how much I’ve come to loathe the word alternate, thanks to all the immoral, evil, toxic assholes embracing it, as if it heralded new ideas. All the whining is because people recognize their crap for what it is, and they aren’t interested in hearing it, or providing a venue for it. It’s about damned time, too.

Let them fucking whine, but don’t be trying to sell their shit as some sterling truth that’s truly new. Farrell should be smacked for writing such idiocy.

This is an ask, an ask to consider their brave, “new” views, which are exactly the same as the very old views, which place almost all people firmly in the inferior camp for one reason or another. It’s pushing the colonial mindset with its genocidal bigotry, the same old fucking bullshit people have been fighting against for much of history. There are always more smug bigots than there are thinking, accepting people, because bigotry is easy. We all live within frameworks of institutional and systemic racism of some sort, here in Ustates, it is the framework, and has been from the start. Just getting some people to even see that framework is a serious, brain-breaking chore. That framework makes it very easy to slide into bigotry, it’s a very comfortable fit for many people, and some of them just insist on justifying their “alternative, radical” views. Those views are not alt-anything, they are as old as the hills, and firmly status quo mainstream. They are not radical, they stink of the banality of evil.

These are people who are waving the Persecution Banner, while pulling down obscene amounts of money, most of it from bigoted fans who are stuffed full of aggrieved entitlement. These are people who are so damn desperate for power, they will say anything, and do anything for a chance at real power. I suspect at least some of them are laughing their arses off on the way to the bank every month, but this does not make them less harmful. They embrace obscurantism while smiling and claiming “science” backs them up. They want to be seen as great leaders, carrying the one and only torch of knowledge, only they understand enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in silencing and oppressing those deemed inferior, dismissing the hordes of the great unwashed with a faint wave of a hand. Bring up the days of the gentry to them, and you’d no doubt hear a chorus of wistful sighs.

It’s all bullshit. It’s not even alternative bullshit, just the same old centuries long song. There is not one alternate thing about it, not one truly new view, not even a hint of originality. These are people who long for the bad old days, and cry at every opportunity because they can’t have that.

Bullshit. Piles and piles of bullshit.

Be Best? More Like Be Plagiarising.

The logo for “Be Best” allegedly designed by Melania Trump herself (image courtesy the White House).

The logo for “Be Best” allegedly designed by Melania Trump herself (image courtesy the White House).

As logos go, we’ve all certainly seen better. Much better. This is astonishingly simplistic, with minimal attraction to it. There’s no bite, nothing to sink teeth and tongue into at all. Mrs. Trump wanted something which would appeal to children, but my first thought was that sprogs of all ages would simply dismiss this as vague and boring. This, um, logo, brand, whatever it is wouldn’t have taken 5 minutes in photoshop. You could simply go to DaFont,* type in “Be Best” and look at it in thousands of different fonts, and you’d probably come up with something better.

Graphic designers the world over probably groaned at the news that First Lady of the United States Melania Trump designed the logo for her new “Be Best” initiative, which New York Times journalist Julie Davis reports came about because the First Lady likes “clean lines” and “wanted something that would appeal to children.”

The logo is part of a campaign aimed at “encouraging children to BE BEST in their individual paths, while also teaching them the importance of social, emotional, and physical health.” Cue eye roll.

[…]

Let’s remember that FLOTUS has an originality problem, so it seems only fitting that the Be Best pamphlet is an almost exact copy of a document published by the Federal Trade Commission in January 2014 — h/t @RMac18. Of course, this isn’t the first time she’s cribbed from the Obama administration, or even the second. Perhaps we’ll soon discover that she copied this logo, too.

You can read more at Hyperallergic, and vote in their poll about “Be Best”.

*I went back to DaFont, switched to cartoon fonts, and decided on Good Morning by imagex. I am in no way a graphic artist, and have zero skills in that regard, but a few minutes mousing in photoshop resulted in this:

I know which one would have attracted my attention as a sprog.

Stitching Medieval Manuscripts.

I have a deep and abiding love of Medieval Manuscripts, there’s always more to discover and wonder over, and here’s a new and delightful discovery to me, the early repairs of manuscripts, where beautiful embroidery was utilised to repair flaws in the parchment.

A plain-colored stitch incorporated into a drawing. Gerald Raab/ Courtesy Staatsbibliothek Bamberg.

A plain-colored stitch incorporated into a drawing. Gerald Raab/ Courtesy Staatsbibliothek Bamberg.

In the Cantonal and University Library in the ancient city of Fribourg, Switzerland, is a 14th-century manuscript with some gloriously beautiful defects. Scattered throughout the text are small tears and holes. And many of them have been carefully, intricately stitched together with colorful thread.

[…]

Holes in the parchment weren’t always dealt with, but when they were, any repairs needed to be done before it could be written on. This might include both patching over holes and evening out edges, explains Sciacca. The repair method could be crude or rudimentary—“Frankenstein” repairs, as Sciacca jokingly calls them—but, as writer Paul Cooper recently highlighted, sometimes they could be quite beautiful.

In that same 14th-century text in Fribourg, a single page is elegantly adorned with two sets of thin stitches, one pink, one green. Elsewhere in the same manuscript there are rainbow-hued repairs of different shapes and sizes. In a text held at the Engelberg Abbey library in Switzerland, stitches at the edge of the page create a “rope”, as Sciacca refers to it, to fill in the edge of the parchment. And from the same library, the missing side of one page has been patched with an additional square of parchment.

A series of repairs made in James of Voragine’s 14th-century Golden Legend. Courtesy Cantonal and University Library Fribourg, Switzerland, Ms. L 34.

A series of repairs made in James of Voragine’s 14th-century Golden Legend. Courtesy Cantonal and University Library Fribourg, Switzerland, Ms. L 34.

As medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel points out, these repairs must have been common in certain monasteries. “Where I was finding a lot of these embellishments were in manuscripts that came from either nunneries, or from what they call in Germany, double cloisters,” Sciacca says. “So you have this paired male and female monastic community. They live separately, but they’re allied with each other, and they’re physically located next to each other. So it seems that this may be part of what was, in fact, women’s training, what was nuns’ training, which was to practice embroidery. And they were doing it not just on textiles, but also actually in manuscripts.”

Stitching wasn’t the only way to make the best of flawed parchment. There are instances of holes being incorporated into illustrations, or used to reveal an illustration on the following page. The stitches themselves could even be embellished. In a text in Germany’s Bamberg State Library, a curve of plain-colored stitching is surrounded with the drawing of a man so that the thread resembles his skeleton.

You can read much more, with lots of links, and see much more at Atlas Obscura. Fascinating!

Youtube Video: Your Ancestors Tried to Kill Each Other!

Matt Easton is not the greatest orator of all time, a lot of tangents upon tangents upon tangents. However this is still  a good point well made and an excellent response to the more and more vocal nationalists and race purists in Europe.

As someone of mixed Germanic/Slavic ancestry who in WW2 had relatives both in SS Waffen* and in Totaleinsatz I can only nod in agreement.

*For the sake of completeness the story as said by my mother:

One of my grandmother’s cousins was conscripted in Wehrmacht and during the war he got transfer order to SS Waffen. That is an offer one cannot refuse, so he has swallowed a bullet, because he just could not follow the orders anymore. However there is no doubt in my mind that I had relatives on that side of the family who fought and slaughtered for the Führer quite happily.

N Is For Nectar and Narciso.

Nectar. Narciso, Portuguese for any plant of the genus Narcissus.

A photo from earlier this Spring showing a flower fly feeding on the nectar of a Narcissus flower of the “Bridal Crown” variety. This double daffodil variety produces long-lasting flowers with a delightful scent. They’re gone now and I miss them already.

Click for full size!

© Nightjar, all rights reserved.

“If you join a gym, don’t join one with gay men in it.”

Over at Barbwire, Robert Oscar Lopez has an article up on how to be a Manly, testosterone laden STRAIGHT DUDE, complete with ten ‘tips’ for getting over that awful gay. There’s so much material (two dense pages), I’m just going to pull bits here and there, you can check the whole mess for yourself, and calling it a mess is a serious understatement. As well as all the lies of the “ex-gay” bullshit, there’s a serious misconception of just what a “straight man” is, too. There’s a full embrace of toxic masculinity, along with some incredible mistakes in that regard. Altogether, it’s terribly pathetic, a complete caricature of being a man, a cartoon construct filled with desperation.

I don’t have much more time before the law makes it illegal for me to share the ten tips I will share in this blog. So I better type quickly and give you ten tips on: how to go from gay to straight. I am speaking from some expertise, but mostly from my own experience. These tips will be helpful if you find yourself wanting to get out of the gay world but your goal is not celibacy.

Oh, I see the drama has not been forsaken. It will be illegal to talk about my desire to be a straight dude, oh no!!1!!

There are certain perks about being gay that you are going to miss. For instance, if you identify as gay, people pity you and give you less responsibility for being a jerk. You get to be a complete whore and have that called liberation. Sex is easy to get and commitments easy to flake out on.

It’s a bad start, painting the queer communities all over the world this way, like a bad ’80s movie. Cruuuuise, baybee! Anyone can be a jerk. Anyone can sleep around. Sex is not always easy to get. Anyone can be afraid of commitment. Unfortunately, Mr. Lopez is all about the stereotypes.

In the gay world, you may have competed from time to time for the attention of men with nice physiques; now, you will be fighting against men with even more well-developed physiques, trying to achieve victory over them in order to win for yourself a coveted prize: a virtuous and desirable wife.

Soon you will see how much harder life is for straight guys.

:Snortsputter: Sorry, almost choked on my tea there. Oh yes, let’s hear it for the poor, pathetic straight dudes. Their lives are so gosh darn hard, livin’ the status quo! Now maybe it’s just me, but I haven’t really noticed a tonne of straight dudes with even MORE well-developed physiques wandering about. Maybe it’s where I live, but there seems to be a preponderance of pot bellies.

Once you go straight, you may go years without sex; nobody wants to hear you cry about it. Once you find your woman, you can’t just blow off things she complains about. You have to sit and listen to her whine about stupid stuff for hours without laughing or rolling your eyes or getting snarky.

I’m not sure the sacrifice is worth this, and while Mr. Lopez goes on and on about the big prize of a wife, owning that there woman, he paints a picture of complete subjection to said woman, and you just have to take it, because that’s the price you pay. There’s not one bloody word about finding a partner, a friend, someone to share your life with love and care. And I have to say, no one is getting my damn snark. It’s all mine, and I’m not sacrificing for anyone.

Most importantly, once you go straight, nobody wants to hear you complain or talk about your problems. The minute you leave gay identity behind, you go from being a pitiable and pathetic victim to a grown man with the ability to solve his own problems. This means you cannot break down or become defeatist, and you cannot expect sympathy just for being you. When straight men threaten to kill themselves if people do not give them what they want, this is called abusive rather than the grounds for a hashtag campaign.

So…you’re saying straight men suck at being friends? All the gay people I know are not considered to be pitiable or pathetic by anyone, least of all themselves, and I’m afraid they get stuck with solving their own problems, just like everyone else, you stupid dipshit. Of course straight men can break down, they can become defeatist, and depressed, just as anyone can, and that calls for support and help, not that you’d offer any, Mr. Lopez. And more to the point, Mr. Lopez, it’s perfectly normal and alright for straight men to break down, feel defeatist, or become depressed. No man should feel like he cannot reach out for help or that men don’t deserve help. Keeping crap all bottled up is the reason why a lot of angry, straight, mostly white men end up going on mass killings. It’s horrible, evil, toxic bullshit that men are supposed to be silent sufferers, that “real” men don’t do this and don’t do that. It’s a shit attitude, and it’s harmful. People are people, and all people should be able to reach out when they are in need, with no stigma attached.

Perhaps the biggest transformation signifies the most important change: your sexual identity will no longer be based on what you want, but rather, what you give to a woman. You must abandon the practice of dwelling on whether you like this or are excited by that–the issue now is: what body do you have, and how can it give pleasure to others? You have a penis, which is the basic piece of equipment to bring happiness to a woman (though you must make sure that match is right). But from now on, the quest is not to gratify your penis, but rather to give pleasure to her with it. You will measure your sex life by how happy she is, how pleasured she feels, how much satisfaction she expresses.

Did you get that, women? All it takes to make you happy is a penis. I wonder if Mr. Lopez knows you can avail yourself of a wide variety of detachable penises, in varying degrees of softness/hardness, colour, and size? Some of those bad boys even have convenient lotion or lube inside. Others have happy time batteries. Oh my! Personally, I don’t want a partner who is obsessed with only one side of the sexual aspect of the relationship.

You need to get healthy, with a decent body mass and strength. You need to be financially stable. If you join a gym, don’t join one with gay men in it. Be around masculine men and pick up their mannerisms and humor. Do not listen to women who say they want sensitive men or an equal share of power in the household; women want leadership, strength, and guidance from men. You have to become a rock of fortitude, a source of security–for men, that is the love we give. And you have to be in good enough shape to make her body feel unbelievable pleasures she might have never imagined.

Just how does one avoid a gym with even one gay person in it? How would you know? I’m pretty sure going around and asking people if they’re some flavour of queer would get you promptly kicked out. Oh, and security is nice, but I prefer my partner to actually like and love me.

The manosphere may shock you (I mean sites like Roosh’s Return of Kings) with its misogyny and vulgarity. But you need to hear the thoughts of straight guys.

Those are not the thoughts of straight dudes, Mr. Lopez. Those are the thoughts of toxic assholes, who are not the least bit interested in finding a wife; they’re into the dark side of that whoredom business, using, abusing, and tossing. It’s all about notches. As for the thoughts of straight guys, well here’s the thing: you’re talking about a fucktonne of individuals, Mr. Lopez, and most of them are not represented by the toxic manosphere. You seem to buying into this notion that a manly man has to be a toxic, misogynistic asshole.  Straight dudes are not a  hive mind, or any other type of collective.

It will also educate you on how straight men deal with setbacks and frustration. You need to increase your masculinity and self-confidence before you start dating girls. In addition to spending your time online in these kinds of environments, you want to do activities that place you in contact with straight men, and do not confide in other guys everything you are dealing with. Part of being a man is not having to talk about everything in your head, and just listening to what other people do. If you want to be in a relationship with a woman, you need to become a man — the kind of person who can be stalwart, unflappable, strong, and reliable, someone with no problems or drama. Being around straight men will gradually help you get there.

Ah, the school of stiff upper lip and penis! You don’t need anymore than that, straight men!

In crass terms, when you become a woman’s sexual partner (husband), the sex life of the marriage will largely depend on your sexual performance. You will need strong abdominal muscles, gluteal muscles, arms, and legs. You want your woman to feel like a powerful animal has her in his power, who instead of crushing her is using his strength to lift her out of the doldrums of this world into a dreamworld of ecstasy and limitless wonder. For her, sex is a vacation like riding the jet skis in Jamaica. You are the stallion she will ride into glory. But to be that stallion, you need to be muscular, have high testosterone, and be fit.

I, uh, I oh gods…falls over laughing. I think Mr. Lopez may have been reading a tonne of bad bodice rippers. A good sex life is one in which all the performances count. If this is just about you, might as well toss the wife a nice detachable penis, and go back to masturbating.

Okay, that’s it for me. I can’t take anymore. I’m going to go clean instead. Yikes. You can read all two pages of compleat shit here.

Word Wednesday.

Stark

Adjective.

1 a: rigid in or as if in death. b: rigidly conforming (as to a pattern or doctrine): Absolute <stark discipline>

2: archaic: strong, robust.

3: utter, sheer <stark nonsense>

4 a: barren, desolate. b 1: having few or no ornaments, bare <a stark white room> 2: harsh, blunt <the stark realities of death>

5: sharply delineated <a stark contrast>

-starkly, adverb.

-starkness, noun.

[Origin: Middle English, stiff, strong, from Old English stearc; akin to Old High German starc strong, Lithuanian starinti to stiffen.]

(Before 12th Century)

²Stark

Adverb.

1: in a stark manner.

2: to an absolute or complete degree: Wholly <stark naked> <stark mad>

(13th Century)

“But someone had left the lights on active mode, and their reflections made the night simultaneously bright and spooky. Flashing off trees, creating gargoyles that lurked in the stark shadows of the underbrush, making people move in stylized slow motion all around me.” – In Dark Woods, Jeannette de Beauvoir.